The Grocery Store Where Food “Doesn’t Exist”

Every time an employer sighs into the void and says, “We can’t find good people,” I do not picture a labor market problem. I picture a fully grown adult standing in a fully stocked grocery store, arms crossed like a disappointed museum docent, staring at shelves that are absolutely bursting with options, and announcing to anyone within earshot that food has been discontinued.

Not “food is expensive.” Not “I forgot my wallet.” Not “I am overwhelmed by choice.” No. Food is simply gone. Vanished. A myth. A legend. An old wives’ tale we tell children so they will stop asking for snacks.

And it is not because the shelves are empty. It is because nothing sprinted into their cart, scanned itself, prepared a meal plan, and apologized for being slightly more experienced than the manager who will be interviewing it.

This is how hiring works now. Not in the practical sense. In the emotional sense. In the vibe sense. In the “I have decided I am being victimized by the existence of other humans” sense.

Companies will lament the absence of “good people” with the same energy someone uses when they complain their phone is broken while holding it upside down. They will stare directly at a sea of applicants, ignore them, filter them out, ghost them, reject them automatically in under eight seconds, and then gather in a conference room to ask why no one is knocking down their door.

Spoiler: people are knocking. Your door is just behind three portals, a CAPTCHA, an account creation page that requires a password with a rune, a sacrifice, and at least one character that does not exist on a standard keyboard.

We have built hiring systems that behave like haunted mansions. Not the fun kind with fake fog and employees in capes. The kind where you wander through dimly lit hallways, stepping on hidden traps, being judged by things you cannot see, and eventually exiting through a gift shop that sells you a polite rejection email and an invitation to apply again in ninety days when the moon is full and the budget committee has stopped arguing about whether “Senior” means a pay increase or just a bigger title.

This article is not meant to bully employers. That would be unfair. Many of them are doing their best, and their best is being held hostage by systems, policies, optics, and the kind of internal bureaucracy that can take six weeks to approve a pen order.

But we do need to talk about the tragedy that keeps replaying in the same three acts:
Act One: “We can’t find good people.”
Act Two: “We refuse to speak to good people.”
Act Three: “Why does no one want to work anymore?”

Let us begin our tour.

The ATS, or “Autocorrect With Authority”

Nothing says “we value humans” quite like letting a keyword-hungry robot with the emotional range of a stapler decide whether you deserve rent money.

The Applicant Tracking System is the bouncer at the club, except the club is a job that pays slightly more than survival, and the bouncer has never seen a human before. The bouncer does not care about your leadership, your results, your character, your decades of experience, or the fact that you once saved an entire department from collapsing like a folding chair at a family reunion.

The bouncer cares about whether you typed the exact phrase: “cross-functional stakeholder alignment.”

If you wrote “worked with other teams,” congratulations, you are now a cautionary tale.

ATS logic is beautifully simple in the way a cartoon trap is simple. It is designed to work flawlessly in a world where humans behave like code. The problem is humans do not behave like code. Humans behave like humans. They use synonyms. They tell stories. They describe the same skill in different words depending on the decade they learned it, the industry they practiced it in, and whether they have had coffee.

And then the system rejects them instantly, like it is offended by their vocabulary.

You can have someone with twenty years of experience, a record of measurable wins, a reputation that could resurrect a struggling team, and references who would fight a bear for them, but if they used “oversaw” instead of “managed,” the ATS will treat them like a counterfeit bill.

Companies call this “efficiency,” which is a corporate word meaning, “We outsourced judgment to a machine so we can say it was objective while it quietly makes decisions based on whatever data it was trained on, which is never the clean, ethical dataset people imagine and always a compost pile of past hiring habits.”

Then comes the performance theater.

The system will demand you upload your resume. Then it will make you re-enter everything on your resume. Then it will quiz you with personality questions written by someone who has never met a personality, never been near a personality, and has only read about personalities in a handbook titled Employee Behavior: Please Stop Having Any.

You will be asked things like:

• “On a scale of 1 to 5, do you enjoy being yelled at?”
• “When faced with conflict, do you: A) resolve it calmly, B) panic internally but smile, C) rebrand the conflict as a collaboration opportunity, D) all of the above depending on payroll?”

And you will answer sincerely, like a responsible adult, while the system quietly penalizes honesty because the correct answer is always, “I am delighted to be controlled.”

Then you wait.

Six days. Six weeks. Six months. Time becomes an abstract concept, like company loyalty or the phrase “we’ll circle back.” Eventually, if you are lucky, you get a rejection email from a system named something friendly and brightly colored like TalentFlow360, as if the software is your buddy, as if it is not currently dragging your hopes behind a moving vehicle.

And the company will say, with full confidence, “We can’t find good people,” while the ATS stands behind them with a clipboard, actively blocking good people like a hall monitor in a dystopian high school.

Generational Bias, or “The Perfect Candidate Is Always Exactly Thirty-Two”

Generational bias in hiring is my favorite subplot, because it is both deeply harmful and wildly ridiculous, like trying to do brain surgery with a butter knife and calling it “bold innovation.”

Somehow the perfect candidate is always exactly thirty-two years old. Not thirty-one. Not thirty-three. Exactly thirty-two, because thirty-two is the age where employers believe you have experience but not opinions, skills but not boundaries, ambition but not a spine, and enough energy to answer emails at midnight without asking why the emails are happening at midnight.

At thirty-two, you are assumed to be technologically psychic, emotionally silent, professionally grateful, and willing to accept a salary last updated during the Bush administration because you “value growth opportunities.”

If you are younger, you are “not experienced enough,” which is corporate for “we want someone trained but we do not want to train them.”

If you are older, you are “too experienced,” which is corporate for “we suspect you will notice when we lie.”

It is a magical paradox. Companies will demand ten years of experience and then stare suspiciously at anyone who actually has ten years of experience, as if you cheated.

They will write job posts like:
“Must have 12+ years of experience. Must be a digital native. Must be energetic. Must be adaptable. Must accept $52,000 and a pizza party.”

And then, when someone applies who meets the requirements, they act like that person has broken into the building.

The interview questions get weird, too, because generational bias loves to disguise itself as “fit.”

“Are you comfortable with technology?”
Friend, I have survived five software migrations, three CRMs, two layoffs, and the invention of Slack. I have installed printers using nothing but rage and a vague prayer. I am not intimidated by your calendar invite.

“Are you still curious?”
No. I am dead inside, and I came here specifically to haunt your onboarding process.

“What motivates you?”
Stability. Respect. A job description that does not read like a hostage note.

And this is where companies lose the plot: they confuse “age” with “attitude,” and “experience” with “entitlement,” and “boundaries” with “lack of drive.”

Older candidates are often more stable, more consistent, more capable of managing chaos without turning it into a musical, and more likely to deliver results without needing constant supervision. Younger candidates are often hungry, fast-learning, adaptable, and capable of mastering tools in days that took older systems months to adopt.

The solution is not picking one generation and discarding the rest like expired yogurt.

The solution is interviewing like a real adult organization.

But instead, companies eliminate entire categories of talent and then gather for strategy meetings about “why the pipeline feels thin,” like the pipeline did not just watch them set it on fire while chanting, “culture fit” and “growth mindset” and “we’re a family,” which is always the most ominous phrase you can hear right before someone asks you to work unpaid overtime.

The Committee, the Spreadsheet, and the Vibes-Based Execution

Now we arrive at the part where the actual work is being done by people who will never meet the person they are rejecting.

Because the most surreal truth of modern hiring is this: the person making the decision is often the farthest possible person from the job.

The hiring manager might love you. The team might need you. The role might be built for your strengths. But the final decision gets made in a room you are not in, by someone who has never spoken to you, scanning a summary that was written by someone who barely listened to you, and weighing it against “internal alignment priorities,” which is corporate for “we already decided, but we are making the process look legitimate.”

You are not being evaluated as a person. You are being processed as a file.

You are being reduced to bullet points in an interview debrief document that reads like a weather report:

• “Candidate seems strong.”
• “Concern: maybe overqualified.”
• “Energy: unsure.”
• “Vibes: mild.”
• “Culture fit: questionable due to having a personality.”

Then the decision is routed through the Great Multi-Layered Approval System, where three layers of management, one HR representative, and a compliance specialist who has never worked in the department will weigh in on whether you are the “right fit.”

They will debate things like:

• “Does the candidate’s experience level intimidate the current team?”
• “Would they stay long enough?”
• “Do they seem like they might ask for raises?”
• “Are they too confident?”
• “Would they challenge the status quo?”

Which is always a fascinating concern, because the status quo is usually the thing they claim they are trying to fix.

This is also where companies accidentally confess the real issue: they are not failing to find good people. They are failing to tolerate them.

Good people have standards. They ask questions. They notice dysfunction. They do not clap politely when chaos is presented as a “fast-paced environment.” They do not pretend that being ghosted for six weeks is “just part of the process.” They do not accept “competitive salary” when the salary is only competitive if you are competing against poverty.

So instead of adjusting the process, companies do what humans always do when faced with discomfort: they blame the universe.

“People don’t want to work.”

No. People do not want to endure your ritual.

People want to work in environments where the hiring process does not feel like a psychological endurance test designed by an escaped escape room architect who had a traumatic childhood experience with trust.

They want clarity. Respect. A timeline that means something. Communication that happens before the position is filled by someone’s cousin.

They want to be treated like a person, not a ticket in a queue.

And employers could have that, if they stopped building systems that punish the exact qualities they claim to want.

Final Thoughts: The Net Is Upside Down and You Keep Yelling at the Fish

Here is the uncomfortable truth that companies desperately need to hear: if everyone keeps failing your process, it might not be the talent pool.

It might be the net. And you are the one holding it upside down, shaking it aggressively, and complaining that the fish are “not motivated.”

Good people are out there. They are applying. They are interviewing. They are doing the hoops. They are showing up with resumes and stories and skills and patience that should qualify them for sainthood.

But they are being filtered out by systems that confuse synonyms with incompetence, by biases that confuse age with value, and by committees that confuse “safe choice” with “good hire.”

If you want to find good people, you do not need a new slogan. You do not need a rebrand. You do not need another “talent acquisition innovation summit” with catered wraps and a slide deck full of words like “synergy.”

You need to talk to humans.

You need to treat technology as a flashlight, not as a judge, jury, and executioner.

You need to stop writing job descriptions that require three careers, four certifications, and a willingness to accept compensation that would make a Victorian factory owner feel awkward.

You need to stop pretending ghosting is normal.

You need to stop blaming the workforce for refusing to worship at the altar of your broken process.

Because food exists. The shelves are full. The talent is there.

You just have to stop standing in the grocery store shouting that reality is wrong, and start pushing the cart like a person who actually intends to eat.